A Belarusian prisoner is among an armed recruit organization of the Wagner Group that fled a base in Ukraine’s Donbass region in December, according to a local news portal.
According to Russian news site Donday, the Russian Interior Ministry issued a statement wanted in the Rostov-on-Don region near the Ukrainian border against six members of the infamous Wagner organization accused of fleeing between Dec. 21 and Dec. 22. of an educational center in the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic.
Among those who escaped from the school were 3 Uzbek citizens, one Kyrgyz citizen, one Russian citizen and one Belarusian. “All six are armed and dangerous,” Donday quoted a police source as saying.
Donday described them as “convicted mercenaries” and as “armed prisoners of the Wagner PMC [Private Military Company]. “
Newsweek was unable to verify this report and has contacted the government of Belarus for comment.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convicted criminal, Russian businessman and close best friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in September 2022 declared himself the mastermind of the Wagner Group, answered a reporter’s question about Wagner’s fugitive fighters.
“The National Guard, the police and the security service of the Wagner PMC are dedicated to the capture of types of armed people,” he said through the press service of the company “Concord”, of which he owns.
Prigozhin added: “And, I, at other levels, from the LPR complex, the DPR and Russian territory, many bad guys are detained, you don’t even want to know. So sleep well. “
The paramilitary organization is very concerned about the ongoing fighting in Ukraine and helped the Russian army in the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Since 2014, the Russian state has continuously denied the group’s existence, saying that mercenaries are illegal under Russian law and that personal army security corporations also cannot, under their law, sell outside Russia.
But after Putin invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, public discourse changed in Russia about which organization provides paid infantrymen, and Russia introduced a procedure for legalizing personal army corporations (PMCs) in the country.
Although the Kremlin still officially denies any direct link between the Wagner Group and the state, many of its campaigns are coordinated with the Russian Defense Ministry.
The Wagner Group recruited large numbers of prisoners for Putin’s war in Ukraine and hired penal colonies in Russia, providing male prisoners with commuted sentences and monetary incentives in exchange for six months of military service in Ukraine.
Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian human rights activist and head of the Gulagu. net Anti-Corruption Project, a prisoners’ rights group, told Newsweek last week that since Feb. 24, as many as 30,000 prisoners have been recruited from prisons and deployed in Ukraine. , while more than 5,000 died in combat and in the camps of the Wagner Group.
Osechkin is suspected of having an extensive network of informants within the Russian criminal formula and lately finds himself in exile in France.
Recruitment for war in Ukraine takes place in prisons only in Russia, but also in some African countries, as well as in Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and even Belarus, Osechkin said, citing his sources.
“We have data that the Belarusian criminal formula opened the doors for Prigozhin and his colleagues to recruit criminals this year. We have the document [dated September 28] on this, when one of the Belarusian justice ministers transferred it to the prison formula branch. to open its doors to an organization of other Russian people who need to enter Belarusian criminals with Prigozhin,” he said.
Belarus, a loyal best friend of the Kremlin, has not joined the Ukrainian conflict. However, Russian troops were able to train on Belarusian territory long before the war began.
Newsweek has reached out to Russia’s Foreign Ministry for comment.
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